


Worlds between Words

by HypnosThanatosTwin



Series: Words to Find your Soul [6]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/F, Lisa is a matchmaker, M/M, Violence against women, but it all ends well, they are both broken - so they match perfectly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 11:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6373555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HypnosThanatosTwin/pseuds/HypnosThanatosTwin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When worlds collide it doesn't have to end in destruction. Sometimes it is the first step towards hope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worlds between Words

**Author's Note:**

> This starts kinda dark, but it gets better I promise. They finally meet :D

**Worlds between Words**

There had been nothing unusual about the day. Her words had appeared a few days back (she hadn't told her dad yet, she was still a little mad at him) and still her heart would jump every time she thought about them, every time she brushed them with her fingertips. She still could barely believe they were there. But the routine of college had gotten her back within days and that particular day had been ordinary up until the point the walls had began to tremble and crack. Up until she tried to get her phone out and call her dad. Up until she was abducted and thrown into a cell within what felt like seconds. 

Jesse freezes, her mind trying to catch up. The most immediate shock to her system is the sudden shackle around her wrist. Not tight enough to cut off her blood-flow, but tight enough to put pressure on her skin. Her breathing is coming in gasps as she tries not to move her arm unnecessarily. It will tear her skin, her thoughts scream at her. Her words, her words, her words.

She looks down at her arm, tears sting in her eyes as she sees the last word of her sentence disappear under the rough iron of the band and chain around her wrist. 

“Please.” she whispers, not sure if Zoom could hear her (it had to be him taking her, who else could it be?), not sure if she wants him to hear her. “Please put it on the other arm.”

There is the sound of lightning and then a shadow looms over her. His eyes are the coldest she has ever seen in a person. She holds out her arms, her heart beating in fear but she takes the gamble. She turns her hands, so that the inside of her wrists is visible. She can see in his eyes the moment he sees her words. There is something like a shift in them, before they turn emotionless again. He moves too fast for her to see and she stumbles from it but the shackle is now on her other arm and she breathes a sigh of relief.

“You try anything, it is back where it was.” his distorted voice informs her. She nods frantically. 

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

The first days she waits. It is agonizing and she hates the fear settling in her gut. Nothing happens. Meals appear in her cell three times a day (at least she assumes it is three times a day) but Zoom never stays longer, never does anything. She is relieved and dreadful at the same time, because this can't last. 

There is another prisoner with her. A man in a mask which gags him so that he can't speak. He knocks. He knocks in patterns she doesn't recognise. He knocks and knocks until his knuckles are black with bruises and blood is leaking down his prison walls. It terrifies her and drives her into madness. Why can't she figure this out?

Besides that there is nothing much to do but wait. She thinks about trying to break out (she actually glides her fingers across every surface of her cell, trying to feel for weaknesses, for points to apply leverage), but there are no weaknesses, no doors, no levers, no keys or electronics. 

“Your father left.” Jesse looks up at Zoom looming over her and her heart seizes with shock (surprise, betrayal, denial, fear). He pulls her up by her throat and she is shocked how much it hurts, how fragile the muscles and tendons in her throat feel, how much she has to struggle to breathe.

“I thought he cared for you, Jesse.” (She hates that he calls her by her name, he doesn't have any right!) “But your father is just a coward, saving himself before his daughter. Maybe I should remind him of what he risks to lose.” she struggles, she tries her best to remember the self-defence classes her father sent her to (she had soaked them up, because there was a nightmare haunting her of a man beating her best friend to death), but she's literally hanging by her throat and her kicks and punches don't faze her superhuman captor. Black spots are blooming across her vision as her body protests the lack of oxygen. The pounding in her head accompanied by the pounding of the masked man against his own cell. She never felt as helpless as in that moment.

Zoom throws her to the ground and tears stream down her cheeks as she gasps for air and glares up at him. He punches her and for a minute she feels dazed as the blow slams her head to the floor, the pain doesn't register but she has never felt the bones in her skull so clearly, her teeth, her jaw, the plates of her skull – then the pain flares. 

There are gloved fingers gently pushing her hair out of her face and she flinches away from them. The fingers tighten around her jaw and she moans with agony as they press into already forming bruises. She hears a click and she realizes that Zoom is taking a picture, then there is the tell-tale electric _whush_ , and he is gone. 

She stays lying on the ground, breathing, sobbing with shock and pain. She feels so _weak_. A tentative knock pulls her out of her stupor and the masked man is leaning against his transparent cell walls, his bruised and bloodied hands pressing against the polymer as if he could just walk through if he presses hard enough. 

Jesse lifts her hand, noticing the chipped nails, the fresh scratches, and holds it up against her prison wall. Her jaw pulses with bone deep bruises, there is a trickle down her face on the other side and another searing pain where it originates. She looks the other prisoner in his eyes and grimaces a smile.

She's going to be okay. Her gaze falls to the blood-red words on her skin. Her breath evens out and the tears dry on her cheeks. 

She's going to be okay.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

After weeks trapped in her cell, only leaving it once to be dangled in front of her father, being under constant stress, waiting for the next instance of pain, for the next shock to her system, it is almost surreal to be out of there. It feels like a dream. Leaving their world behind, entering a parallel world. (And it is a strange world, the glimpses she saw, all glass and chrome).

Her father is overprotective and she understands, but she is trapped again, even if she is way more comfortable than before, she's still trapped. She tries to distract herself by watching the news, learning the slight changes that made this world so different from her own. (No mayor Snart, no Senator Knowles, the cold war lasting a few years longer, big and small things that changed little and big things. Familiar faces with foreign expressions. Black words instead of red).

It all comes to a head when she is held hostage (again) and injected with Velocity 9, barely surviving the experience. She has to get _out_! Away from her father, who would break this world too, if it would save her. Away from the threat looming over her if she stays. She uses the papers she got from Caitlin and Cisco and sells a few programs she created (She had graduated MIT with honors last year. She had been in the middle of her studies at John Hopkins when she'd been abducted). Apparently there weren't that many studies into the field of cinematic scanning yet. 

She buys a ticket to Opal City and leaves a message to her dad. She is in a whole new world, she just regained her freedom, she needs to actually _be free_.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Jesse sees her in Prague. Her brown, golden-streaked hair is blown across her face by the wind. Her blue-green eyes are cold and piercing, her nose pointed, her eyebrows sharp. She seems familiar and then Jesse recognizes her with a force that nearly buckles her knees. She forgets that she is in a different world as she runs up towards the woman, captures her arm and softly says:

“I saw you die.” Jesse holds her breath, her heart pounding in anticipation. Sea-green eyes widen and a gasp escapes between bow shaped lips. Suddenly Jesse feels anxious and foolish. This has been a stupid impulse, she should have known better (familiar faces in a different world). She lets go and is about to step away and apologize, when strong hands suddenly, but gently, grasp her arms. She looks up and the smile greeting her is awakening a swarm of butterflies.

“And you kept me waiting”  
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-  
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Lisa doesn't last a day after her words appear and calls Len. Her brother is concerned and happy for her in his own emotionally constipated way (he is way better than he could be, she remembers the days before Mick, he's practically well adjusted in comparison to his teen-self). Mick just laughs in the background, happy for her. She's still brimming with joy as they talk for hours, talking about the black-hole over Central City, the Flash and the next jobs they are planning respectively. 

It dims on her next visit home, when all the mess with Lewis Snart happens (he doesn't deserve to be called their father). But her heart lightens afterwards, when Len has killed the man that had once been the origin of all her nightmares (he still is, if she is honest with herself). She leaves town again after breaking her brother out from prison, she knows enough about Len and his husband, that she knows not to distract them from each other in the next days. 

She checks up on Neal in Metropolis instead, shaking her head at his infatuation with a fed, while they share a bottle of expensive (stolen) wine. She helps him with a quick con, thanks him for her share of the loot with a kiss to his cheek and moves on towards the next person in her network of friends. 

She gets a call from Len when she's in Mombasa, pickpocketing a friend without him noticing. She will give the wallet to another friend of hers, when she is back in the States. It will be a lot harder, but she'll try to give it to him without noticing it either. The two have never met, but she has a feeling that they would get on like a house on fire. 

The call distracts her from her plan. Len sounds strange, unusually hesitant with his words. It almost sounds like a goodbye and Mick is suspiciously silent in the background. She packs the few things she brought and gets the next flight pointing towards Central City. 

She's glad she does, when she arrives the next day, exhausted and cranky, and gets a call from Mick. She enters their apartment and knows that something happened. Len is in silent mode (she had hoped never to experience those again) and pulls her into a hug. All her alarm-bells go off. 

“We're watching Star Wars, wanna join in?” Mick asks her, his arms full with junk-food. 

“Sure, which one?” she pulls Len along towards the couch like a giant leach. 

“All of them.” Mick growls and Lisas eyebrows rise in disbelief. She wants to ask what happened, but knows that this is not the time. She will wait for Len to begin making quips about the movies, for Mick to set something small on fire, for the first true laughter. 

She leaves Central City with a story about travelling through time and saving the future. It sounds like a TV show, if she hadn't seen her boys right after it, she might not have believed them. Now she's just shaking her head. Her brother had never known to stay out of trouble. (She was pointedly not thinking about all the times she had landed in messy situations, through no fault of her own.)

As she is in the States, she visits Arthur in National City, almost getting caught while smuggling the wallet from Mombasa into his duffel bag. He can't stay long, already called into the next mission he can never talk about. She feels domestic as she is alone in his small house at the edge of the city and leaves after she has washed all of his clothes, taking special care with his dress-blues. She sits in the sun reading, while the clothes dry on the lines in the garden. 

Next stop is St. Petersburg where Anatoli and Vladimir almost drive her up the wall with their antics. Don't they have an army of mobsters to control? Anatoli just laughs and pulls her along to the ballet, galleries and to museums, while Vladimir huffs and grudgingly goes back to ordering around his underlings and managing the dreaded paperwork. The brothers try to set her up with some of their trusted friends until she caves and tells them about her words. They are fascinated, both of them have met their soul-mates (straight-laced lawyers from Hells Kitchen, New York, don't ask her how that worked out) and are ridiculously happy with them. 

They throw a party in celebration and she has never seen so many bottles of vodka having so little effect on people. It's terrifying. 

She plans to meet up with her favourite crazy thief in Lyon and decides to make a quick stop in Prague on her way there. She loves the darkly looming buildings, loves how she can almost feel the ghosts of history walking through the streets with her. It's a grey day, windy and she is starting to regret not having her hair bound with a tie, when she is grabbed by her arm and she is turned around by a beautiful young thing. 

“I saw you die.” the words are spoken in disbelief, as if in shock and Lisas breath stutters in her chest. _This is it!_

Her eyes wander over the light brown hair with a shimmer of red, notice the faint, healing bruise on her jaw and get captured by a jade green gaze. It feels like her world is shifting, like the sun is breaking through clouds. 

Then the fingers leave her arm and the expression on the girls face begins to shutter. Lisa reaches for her on instinct. She doesn't want to lose this. 

“And you kept me waiting.” she says with a laugh full of joy. She sees the light spark in those jade pools and the bright, intoxicating smile joining hers. She leans forward until their heads lean against each other and the world around them fades until there is just the two of them.

She had spent years feeling like a leaf in the wind, untethered, part of this world but alone. For the first time in her life she feels solid. 

For the first time in her life, she feels _complete._

END

**Author's Note:**

> Let's start a game of: can you spot the fandom? Lisa has a lot of friends.  
> Hope you enjoyed the journey.


End file.
